When i first started trading i tried just about every charting/screening program out there. I've tried Omnitrader, AIQ Tradiing Expert Pro, and Metastock. After you read their sales brochures, u get the idea that their stock screening programs show u the way to trading Nirvana.
But in reality the screening programs fail to live up to expectations. You'd be better off flipping a coin!!! However, if you want a EOD program for charting and backtesting u cant beat Metastock Pro 7.02. Another advantage of Metastock is that there is alot of aftermarket programs written for it you might like. There a company online called wallstreetsoftware.com(?) that sells Metastock for 340 dollars. Thats about 60 bucks less than omnitrader, and a much better value. If you want a stock screening tool i'd recommend Tradeprospector, its about as close to trading Nirvana you'll get.

Hello sterling, in your message you posted that youve tried every charting/screening program out there including metastock and say that your better off flipping a coin yet you go on to say that metastock end of day is a nice one to get . Plus you say that trade prospector is as close to trading nirvana as you can get. What makes metastock-eod, and trade prospector any better at those odds than the other mentioned programs including metastock real-time.
Also i went to a robert deel seminar a few months back here in san diego which was very educational and he has a program that gives you a six step formula to screening(on meta-stock software) the best tradable stocks plus formulas on entry and exit points. He is supposed to be one of the top traders out there .
He basically started out the seminar by telling us that his name is robert deel and he is a professional trader and 9 out of 10 times the professional trader will take the novices money and be very happy about it.
Very blunt and to the point.
his trading courses are very expensive also.
wall

I have ( and still use ) MetaStock EOD, OmniTrader EOD, TradePropsector and Bigeasyinvestor ( the latter primarily as a source for inexpensive eod data for use with MetaStock and fundamental / chartpattern screening screening ).

Whether a program is good or bad for a user depends heavily of what he wants to achieve with it.

Don't think any software out there is likely to be the holy grail. Finally, success in trading is not depending on software but on your personal system, your money-management and how you circumvent the psychological traps comming along with trading the markets.

Now to the software packages :
OT was which was originally developed by Nirvana to automate certain tasks which you would carry out in MetaStock step by step.

Say, in MetaStock, you would screen ( explore ) your data base for stocks showing a certain type of trade signal, i.e. a Stochastic buy signal. Depending on the number of stocks in your data-base, you would end up with a list of maybe 10 or 20 every trading day.
Now you want to know, how well the stochastics-signals performed in the past wich these stocks. You would have to create a trading system based on STO signals - buy when STO rises above 20 , sell when it falls below 80, in order to test this. You may add certain additional qualifiers for trade entries and exits and conditions for stop-loss and profit -taking and the size of the position. That's called a trading system. In short, your system says : when x happens, do y but only when a + b are valid too.
Than you run this system on every stock of your list and compare the results.
Now imagine, that MetaStock offers 120+ indicators, + you can build your own ones and import 3rd. party indicators.

If you like to test each and every Indicator onb every stock you like to follow, this process would probably prevent you from trading at all.

In my opinion, MetaStock ( or Tradestation for that matter ) are good programs when you have one or a only a few pre-defined markets and you want to develop trading systems for these markets ( say Index fututers, commodities ) and you follow only these markets day by day.

Omnitrader follows a different strategy and philosophy.
As we all know, no system, no matter how good it is, will work in all markets and during all times. Markets are changing all the times. They fluctuate between trending and sideways periods.
So what OT does is, to select from a list of 60 indicators ( weekly and daily, so they say 120 ) those who work best at any given time. To make things even better, you can use literally thousands of markets at a time in OT, and let OT find out the best systems for each individual market.
This process takes only a few minutes and the trader can focus on signals and trading rather than trying to figure out, which technical indicators work best under current market-situations.
Along with each testrun in OT, you get a bunch of statisctis, telling you, how good the combination of systems worked on each stock ( mutual fund or future ) you have tested. You can also pre-select some general trading rules with regard to your system - i.e. all trades shall have a fixed stop-loss or a trailing stop-loss and so on.
You could further limit the trades only to be executed, when the risk : reward ratio exceeds a certain level.
And so on.
Finally, you can inspect all stocks on your focus list on charts. Trendlindes, Fib-retracements, S&R lines, Candlestick patterns are drawn automatically. In addition, you can disply every indicator used in OT on every single chart.

You can setup your portfolios in OT - that's where you track your trades. You can set stop-loss and alert-signals in any chart you like. Once you enter a trade, OT sets the system-recommended stop-losses automatically in the chart. You don't have to remember, which stock loss you set for which stock - it's all on the chart.

OT has also a lab-mode and a game mode. The game-mode is fine for learning how to read charts, because you trade a stock based on OT signals as it goes forward in time. Of course, you don't know which stock it is by the time when play the "game". When the game ends, you know exactly how much money you made ( lost ), trading this stock.
With the lab mode, you can test certain OT strategies, outlayed in the web-content.

I'd say, for those who don't like to bother much with hundreds of trading systems and technical indicators, screening for certain signals etc. and want a complete solution including portfolio-management, OT is nice alternative to many packages out there.
What it does, is to give you trading ideas and the tools to manage the trades.
The realtime version does exactly the same as the EOD version, but, as the name says, based on RT quotes. So you get RT buy and sell signals based on backtested indicators.
System-parameters setting,Portfolio-, alert and automatic charting capabilities are the same as with the EOD version.

Is it any better or worse than MetaStock or other programs ?
Well, I'd say it's different. TA is an art rather than a science and you could spend your life-time testing systems and software and never actually make a trade because you search for the holy grail which gives you the ultimate signals.

What OT, and all other software, does is , to teach you a systematic approach for trading and OT is surely effective with regard to this target. At a certain moment, when you have more experience with TA and trading, you might think of adding tools like TP to your arsenal of weapons.

I can only recommend, to use the offers of many software vendors, like Equis or Nirvana or TC 2000,to name a few, to testrun their products for a certain period of time and to find out, whether the philiosophy behind the product fits your personality.

I am ( most of the time ) a lazy guy and, although I like to dig deep into trading-systems to find out how and why the work or fail, I also appreciate the convenience offered by OT and TradeProspector, to find good trading opportunities fast and without going through hours of testing and studying.

To clarify my original post, I meant to say that I liked metastock basically because of all the aftermarket programs written for it. In fact, thats the only reason i bought it. Jeff Cooper and Laurence Connors both have programs designed for Metastock to screens stocks according to their trading methods. Its features are no better or worse than the others. As for tradesprospector, it not really a screener. It provides support/resistance and Fibonacci projections/retracements. It does provide daily bulletins that contains a few examples(screens) and their s/r etc to look for the next day. Very accurate. U ought to try it out. They give a 30 day trial.

The daytrading section provides scans for overbought, oversold stocks, most volatile, biggest gainers & loosers, 52 week highs and lows, most $ action, and stocks showing unusual volume.
For all screens, you can setup some personal criteria, like price range of the stocks, exchange traded, in some screens the direction of the trend etc.

There's also a multi-screen, which shows all patterns for all stocks and you just click on the pattern you want want to trade and stocks showing this pattern ( indicator ) will pop up in the list.

You could even screen for stocks showing multiple patterns
i.e ADCT shows today three pattern indicators :
an envelope-pattern, breakthrough momentum and channel-breach.

In the options section, you scan for options with unusual activity, overpriced and underpriced options, Stocks with the highest put/call ratios, high premium and low premium options and finally, you have an options montage, scanning for the best options for a variety of strategies.

If this is not a screener - what is it then ?

Once you have finished your screening, TP shows you ST, MT and LT support and resistance levels derived from a bunch of calculations ( among other fibonacci levels, Standard-deviations etc. )
It actually tells you at what price you should enter a position and were to set your stop losses.
The option-montage and analysis tools are unmatched by any other software I have tested in the past.

As you said yourself, TP's calculations are very accurate. So they can be used as a very good guidance for ST as well as for LT trading and to manage you trades.

TP's strength lies in identifying patterns you can trade and providing the price levels to watch out for during your trade.

What I do, is to use Bigeasy for creating sector / industry watchlists or fundamental screens ( earningsgrowth etc.)
I export these lists and the historical data from Biggeasy into MetaStockformat and let OT run on it for technical indicator signals. I use also the Bigeasy portfolio-function when in a trade.
When I get 5 or 6 strong signals, I use TP's S/R calculations to manage the trade or to select the best available options-stragtegy for this trade.

Unfortunately, there's no software out there I know of, which would do all these steps together in the same accurate way as TP does for trading-calculations or OT does on technical screening & backtesting.
So I decided to use the "specialists" for each step.

But I think, I will go back to TC2000 for data supply, sector and industry screening.

Why ?

I was really very satisfied with Bigeasy until I upgraded recently to version 3.0.

BigEasy version 3.0 is, IMO, a step backwards with regard to reliability and stability of the program compared to the previous version.
I had no problems at all with version 2.0

For to use 3.0, I had to carry out multiple re-installations and the charting module has still it's problems and crashes almost every time I start the program.

Also data supply has become unreliable since they switched to a new vendor for EOD data recently.
Sometimes, the downloaded data is simply not merged with existing data on the HD, and you can start the download process all over again.
EOD data from the new vendor seems to be less accurate too. This can spoil your complete technical indicator screening. That's annoying.
When sending emails to their customer support about these problems, you get a friendly message, apologizing for the inconveniences and asking you to re-install the program.

I have the feeling, Bigeasy really got worse after they have been taken over by Ameritrade.

But, no complaints allowed - BE is for free, including EOD data. So for the basic tasks, portfolio-management and web-research, it's still very good. You get what you pay for.

MetaStock - I bought OT and MetaStock 6.52 two years ago as a bundle from Nirvana ( less than 500$ for both programs together ). And there's still some use for MS, sometimes, at least.

I hope, the JC screens will pay out for you.
175$ for a set of a few simple screens is a lot of money.
After reading the book, it should be no problem to build these screens yourself in MetaStock. There are only a few variables in each of JC's screens and the patterns he uses are fairly simple.

For some of his screens, you could even use Bigeasy and search for 3 day bull- / bear reversals and breakouts ( pre-calculated ), apply the volume / price restrictions laid out in the book , than buy / sell on the next day .25 points above the prior days high or 0.25 points below prior days lows when shorting as JC recommends.

I found , that many of JC's patterns don't work anymore under current market-conditions.

BTW : for those here using TC2000, there are some very interesting usergroups out there, providing information, easyscreens and ready to go personal-criteria formula's based on a variety of popular strategies and indicators.
Just copy and paste into TC2000.

P.S. Sterling - my apologies for not posting the JC scans anymore. Had too much work to do. It's very time consuming to run the several scans each day in MetaStock ( the easy part ) and afterwards putting them all in a textfile (including entry and exit prices ) for posting them here. You can't export scan-results from MS 6.53 just print them.